June, 2015 Building Loyalty and Leaders with Millennials

May, 2015 Confessions of an Executive Coach

Notes from Presenter (Elizabeth Kunze):

One of the women who was in the room that day (during UWIT presentation) asked me about how to manage communication and create better esprit du corps with virtual teams. She also asked about how to gage reputation with virtual teams as well. See following article:

While this article does not directly address the question posed to me during the presentation, the article does provide insight into how to leverage communication to help increase team engagement. And thereby also use communication to gage and even qualify one’s reputation with virtual teams. But as the article suggests, the communication must be proactive and objective driven.

I posted this article to several groups on LinkedIn, but NOT because of the women angle. I posted the article to LinkedIn, because I am always having conversations with my leadership development and coaching clients (who manage and work with virtual teams) about how to create high-performing virtual teams. This article suggests that the basic behaviors / practices used to create high performing teams are the same for in-person, side-by-side teams as well as virtual teams. (Fascinating!)

The more interesting response from many on the LinkedIn posts was, “well, of course, any team with women will have better communication than other teams“, with such comments came from male LI members. To which I had to respond and clarify that the women angle was NOT the reason that I posted the article.

A very important item to remember with virtual teams as I have read and heard from clients is communication. The number of communication messages is important, as well as the content. Frequent communication touch points with brief and concise messages (or talking points) seems to be more or most effective.

While long tomes or weekly / monthly meeting notes that go on and on seem to be least effective. Additionally, the team leader must set the tone that electronic virtual communication is important and that the expectation is that the team will read the notes to stay tuned.